


Sirius Black

by wordswehavesaid



Series: Queer Headcanons [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexuality, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 08:33:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6746809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordswehavesaid/pseuds/wordswehavesaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A conceptualization of the character as an asexual man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sirius Black

**Author's Note:**

  * For [colorofmymind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/colorofmymind/gifts).



> Been a long time since I wrote anything for the HP fandom! Hello! I actually completed this around February but finally got around to cross-posting it here. Part of a series of my imaging characters from various fandoms as queer, whether in identity or sexuality, within the canon. Please enjoy!

Sirius was born and raised in the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black, the first son and heir to the family name. As such, he grew up knowing there were expected duties of him to uphold their house’s honor and to continue their line _Tojours Pur_.

None of this interested Sirius, particularly the latter task. He found the antics of his elder female cousins training to attract a husband, Bellatrix’s smoky stares and Narcissa’s preening, completely incomprehensible and a nuisance, and he certainly couldn’t be bothered with behaving in that sort of way himself. His mother fumed at every rebuff he gave to her lectures on gentlemanly manners and customs and his father looked on him coldly for not doing as told. The only one who bothered to try and see things from Sirius’ point of view was Andromeda. 

She’d straighten out the wrinkles in his dress robes he’d gotten chasing Regulus about the house and listen to his complaints. “I know it seems boring now, Sirius, but someday when you’re older it might not be so bad.”

“But it’s awful, Andy! I don’t want to be stuck with some other person hanging around all the time and getting in the way!” Sirius had determined at a young age that he was easily the most brilliant person in his whole family, and though Andy could keep up sometimes, he hadn’t time for anyone else and their simpering politeness and favors towards the heir to the House of Black while they shoved their daughters at him.

“At least you have something of a choice,” Andromeda sighed, and looked off over his head with a somber expression. His cousin often wore a frown as they grew older.

But Sirius does eventually meet a person he could envision spending all the rest of his life with, and it’s on the Hogwarts Express at the age of 11: James Potter. James isn’t like all the other pureblood rot he’s known all his life, he’s funny and clever just like him. James smiles at him with no expectation and jokes just for the laugh, and Sirius learns that this is what friendship is called.

He’s never had a friend in his life and friends are _wonderful_ , so much better than all that betrothed nonsense, and he finds himself reaching out with James to the other boys in their dorm, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew. Having even more friends is better than he thought it’d be, particularly now that Narcissa glares at him in the halls and Andromeda won’t talk to him unless they’re alone. She tells him she’s keeping her head down, and he wants that to hurt less than it does.

But it’s on a nighttime excursion with James that he finds out Andromeda isn’t quite so cowardly concerning other things. The two first years have been exploring every inch of the castle, eager to learn it’s every trick, when they stumble across a not-so-secret passageway, his cousin with a Hufflepuff in her year already occupying it. And the things they’re doing– James turns bright red and stops in his tracks for a moment, tugging on Sirius’ arm to get them moving back the way they came from. He has to drag Sirius all the way back to their dorm.

Later, James will try to play it off, make a joke, something about how Sirius probably never wanted to know that much about his family, but he blanches and turns white as a sheet and James drops it. The next morning there’s a butterbeer and Honeydukes sweets waiting at the foot of his bed and he was never really mad at James anyway.

But he goes to Andromeda about it at Christmas. “You can’t tell _anyone_ , Sirius, please,” she hisses back at him, pale face turning splotchy and red in places, reminiscent of how she’d looked that night in the dim light of the corridor, hair tousled and blouse undone as that boy’s hands rested on her body. It looks horrid. “Ted’s a mu- muggleborn, if my parents found out–”

“I don’t care about that,” he dismisses with a wrinkle of his nose. “I just want to know why. Why you would… _do_ that.”

She looks at him for a long time. “Because I love him.”

And Sirius knows somehow they’re talking about two different things. Because he knows love, the love he holds for Andy and James, Remus and Peter, and even little Reg who never answers his letters. But love would never make him do that, why would he _ever_? He knows Andromeda loves Ted but he doesn’t understand what about love makes a person relinquish their body to that kind of greedy touch. He doesn’t think he ever wants to.

Sirius knows he only survives that first summer holiday unharmed because Andromeda runs off with Ted Tonks, and his family is far too preoccupied in that scandal to deal with unruly Gryffindor him. He hears their snarls and moans, the awful things they say about her. Blood traitor. Filth. _Whore_. And Sirius stays silent as his stomach churns unpleasantly. It doesn’t help that now Andromeda’s run off with Ted she doesn’t even write. So Sirius doesn’t either.

As their Hogwarts years go on, James becomes a Quidditch star and girls start to notice as he walks by. They giggle as his friend ruffles his hair, and only once does Sirius tell him he reminds him of Narcissa and her constant touch-ups at his family’s high-society functions. The stinging hex sent his way is only barely deflected before they’re having an out and out jinxing battle in the halls. The girls all giggle at Sirius whenever he walks past as well, or sighs or says something witty. He’s told over and over that he’s very handsome, that he’d have his pick of any girl in their year barring perhaps the Slytherins. He knows Remus sometimes stares at him enviously, hands straying to the scars that cross his face, while Sirius fixes his hair in the mirror, and that his friend would be looking for the elusive “love” did he not consider himself a monster.

Sirius learns to perfect the haughty, aloof air his parents always taught him for those lesser than them, but instead employs it as a tactic to keep his various admirers at bay. Whenever he’s the one holding onto the Map, he uses it to take shortcuts wherever he needs to go. He only likes an audience when he’s agreed to a performance, not this blatant evaluation of his and everyone else’s looks that the whole school has seemingly grown obsessed with.

He gets Muggle posters from the muggleborns in their house to hang up in his room at home. Page after page is splattered with some smiling woman dressed in barely anything and he loves the way his mother shrieks every time she enters his room and sees them a thousand times more than the actual images themselves. He spends hours, instead, pouring over the pictures of motorbikes, memorizing what the parts are called and which one goes where to make it function. That’ll make the enchantments he plans to place on it that much more effective. He tells all his friends about it; Remus is disapproving and James is elated as expected. Peter jokes he could use it to pick up chicks, and Sirius scowls.

James tries to explain things to him when he catches the Chaser doodling a certain redheaded prefects initials alongside his own again. “Well sure I think Evans is beautiful, Padfoot. She’s gorgeous. The prettiest girl in the school. But it’s _more_ than that. She’s so smart, and witty and she just- she doesn’t let me get away with anything and it drives me _mad_ but I can’t get enough of it–”

“Yeah, yeah I get all that just fine, thanks,” says Sirius with a roll of his eyes. Honestly, does James think he’s thick? “But you’d want to go out with her.”

James turns a little red but admits, “Course I would.”

“And then you’d want to…”

“To? Use your words, mate!”

But he doesn’t think he can. That familiar roiling feeling in his stomach is back and he gives a quick shake of the head. “I’m going out. Give me the cloak, eh Prongs?”

And James hands it over, not without asking, “You alright, Sirius?”

He doesn’t answer.

James is in love, it’s clear to tell, with Lily Evans. Just like Andy was with Ted, and why does this always have to happen? That love that makes it so no one else’s love matters. Will James run off and away from him with Lily?

But he takes a chance that summer when he’s sixteen, showing up on the Potter’s doorstep with the clothes on his back and his trunk of clothes and schoolbooks. The fight started because when Sirius turned down another offer to meet some pureblood heiress, he rashly stated he never wanted to marry in his life much less continue their decrepit family line. That had been the last straw for his mother.

All Mrs. Potter does is usher him inside and his belongings up into a room of his own. James wraps him up in a fierce hug and he realizes he should’ve known better than to doubt him.

And when James does start dating Lily, it’s not the horror he thought it’d be. James has always been nice to him and their two friends but Lily makes him kind. To nearly everyone. In turn his best friend softens the Head Girl’s edges, causes a laugh when before there were only stern frowns and _this_ is what love ought to be, Sirius thinks, always, just this. It’d be enough for him, even as he knows it’s never enough for everyone else, not even the people he cares the most about. He’s always been the odd one, after all.

He’s happy to toast to James and Lily’s marriage, considers it an honor to watch their back in the field of battle, protect them because he knows how sad it would be to the Order and their cause should something happen to one or the both of them, _the lovers_ , so much sadder than losing him, the bachelor. 

But when he’s shown into the little room at St. Mungos, when James turns to him with tears in his eyes and a ear-to-ear beam of absolute joy on his face, half braced over the bed where Lily sits looking radiant with a little bundle of tiny, fragile human in her arms, he feels an new kind of love altogether.

He realizes now it’s not kids that he never wanted, because Harry is _everything_. Just as much Sirius’ as he is James’ and Lily’s, and they all know it. He spends the money his Uncle Alphard set aside lavishly on magical mobiles and toy broomsticks, watching the moving picture Lily sends him after Christmas hungrily, his family all right there. For them he would do anything, give anything.

And for them he does.


End file.
